The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (26 page)

“No, madam, you shall go into your lodging that you lay in at your coronation,” the constable told her. He was referring to the Queen’s apartments in the royal palace, which had been refurbished for her at great expense three years earlier.

“It is too good for me!” Anne cried. “Jesu, have mercy on me!”

This was a strange observation for a woman who had just protested that she was not guilty of the crimes of which she was accused. If she were indeed innocent—and that had to be presumed until she was condemned—then she deserved to be accorded the respect due to her rank and to be comfortably housed as queen. Moreover, the news that she was to be held in such state, and not in a dungeon, might have been cause for optimism and an uplifting of spirits. Anne’s assertion that it was too good for her might suggest that she knew herself to be guilty of something. But maybe she was just too hysterical to know what she was saying, for after uttering these strange words, Kingston reported, she “kneeled down weeping a great pace, and in the same sorrow fell into a great laughing, and she hath done [so] many times since.”

Kingston must have applauded the decision to lodge Anne in the Queen’s apartments, since his wife was to be in attendance on her, and it would make things easier for that lady to be housed in comfort. It is unlikely that this decision had been made by the constable;
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the orders
had probably been relayed through Cromwell. Anne was still the Queen of England, and not as yet convicted of any crime, and even when she was, she would still be honorably housed in the Tower. She was never treated as a common prisoner.

Kingston now conducted her to her lodgings, which lay on the east side of the inner ward between the Lanthorn Tower and the Wardrobe Tower, and had been rebuilt three or four years earlier.
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Although the Tower palace was a favored royal residence for centuries, it had become outdated by the Tudor period, and Anne only stayed there once, with the King, on the two nights before her coronation. In 1532-33, in anticipation of that triumph, Cromwell, on Henry’s orders, spent £3,500 (£1,276,000) on repairs and improvements, so Anne might be accommodated in suitable splendor. The walls and ceilings were decorated in the “antick” Renaissance style, and the luxurious apartments comprised a “great” (presence) chamber, a closet leading off that appears to have been used by Anne as a private oratory, a dining chamber embellished with a novel “mantel of wainscot with antick,” and a bedchamber with a privy. Since Anne left these rooms for her coronation in June 1533, they had lain deserted. By the end of the sixteenth century they would be uninhabitable,
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and at the end of the eighteenth, they would be dismantled.
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Kingston had instructions from Cromwell to record anything of significance that Anne said. For this reason, those appointed to wait on her were to be forbidden to speak with her unless Lady Kingston was present.
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Master Secretary was evidently hoping that she would incriminate herself out of her own mouth, and thus bolster the case being drawn up against her. Kingston was faithfully to obey his orders, and his reports are preserved in the Cotton manuscripts in the British Library; they were damaged in the fire that swept through the Cottonian Library in 1731, but were seen and largely transcribed before then by the antiquary John Strype who printed them in his
Ecclesiastical Memorials of the Church of England under King Henry VIII
in the eighteenth century. These letters give vivid insights into Anne’s imprisonment and her state of mind while she was in the Tower.
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The ladies and servants who had been chosen to attend the Queen were waiting to greet her in the presence chamber. Anne’s old nurse, Mrs. Mary Orchard, had been chosen as one of her two chamberers (domestic
servants)—an unexpected kindness, this—along with the “Mother of the Maids,” Mrs. Stonor, the former Margaret (or Anne) Foliot, who was married to Sir Walter Stonor, he being the King’s sergeant-at-arms and a prominent courtier; Mrs. Stonor later became a maid-of-honor to Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife.

Anne had also been allocated two menservants (probably grooms or ushers) and a boy. But the Queen could not have been pleased to see the other four ladies, who were clearly spies chosen by Cromwell to watch and report on the prisoner. There was her aunt, Elizabeth Wood, Lady Boleyn, the wife of her father’s younger brother, Sir James Boleyn of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, who, despite being chancellor of Anne’s household, had—perhaps pragmatically, seeing his niece heading for ruin—switched his allegiance to Lady Mary.
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Another aunt had also been set to spy on Anne: her father’s sister, Lady Shelton, she who had helped make life a misery for Lady Mary.

We might pause here to consider if Lady Shelton was more willing to spy on Anne and work for the downfall of Norris and Weston on account of their cavalier treatment of her daughter Madge. In February 1535, reasoning that if the King had to have a mistress it should be someone sympathetic to herself, Anne had maneuvered Madge Shelton into his path. The brief affair that ensued soon petered out, but not before it caused Anne bitter pangs of jealousy and sullied the Shelton girl’s reputation; by 1536, Madge Shelton was betrothed to Sir Henry Norris, but clearly (as will be seen) Sir Francis Weston thought she was fair game. Anger at the compromising of her daughter may well have turned Lady Shelton against Anne and her faction.

Yet Lady Shelton had perhaps been nursing another grievance against Anne for some time. As we have seen, she was forced to follow the Queen’s instructions and make Lady Mary’s life a misery, which ill-treatment only served to reinforce the girl’s suspicion that the Boleyn faction was trying to do away with her. Yet although Anne’s letters to Lady Shelton reveal that she placed great trust in her, and there is no hint of any falling out between them, it is possible, even likely, that Lady Shelton resented the role she was forced to play, and that remorse had bred in her a desire to be revenged on the niece who had driven her to such cruelties, and to distance herself from them.

There may also have been a third reason for Lady Shelton’s defection.
Her son, John Shelton, was married to Margery Parker, the sister of Lady Rochford,
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and it is possible that the Sheltons were disposed to be sympathetic to Jane Rochford’s complaints against her husband, even to the extent of believing in her allegations of his incest with the Queen, and viewing Jane as a deeply wronged woman. If so, it is hardly surprising that Lady Shelton was willing to cooperate with Cromwell. On the other hand, she—and Lady Boleyn—may well have felt that, above all other considerations, it was politic to do so, since the Boleyn faction was hurtling headlong to destruction. Whatever her motives, Lady Shelton had learned from Anne how to treat a disgraced royal lady, and she now had the opportunity of putting that knowledge into practice once more.

The other two chief attendants who were to be employed as spies were Mary Scrope, Lady Kingston, Sir William’s second wife, who perhaps was not enjoying good health at this time, for her husband had described her as “my sick wife” the previous January;
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she had served Katherine of Aragon and was a friend of Lady Mary, so cannot have been sympathetic toward Anne. Lastly, there was Margaret Dymoke, Mrs. Coffin (or Cosyn), the wife of William Coffin, who was the Queen’s Master of Horse and one of the King’s long-favored Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, and resided—when not at court—at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. He would be knighted the following year, by which time his wife was in the service of Jane Seymour.
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The Coffins were related by marriage to the Boleyns. Mrs. Coffin was “a gentlewoman appointed to wait upon the Queen here, and that lay on her pallet bed;”
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it was normal practice for a servant to share a royal bedchamber and attend to any needs of their master or mistress during the night.

Anne viewed these ladies with dismay; by her own later admission, she had never liked any of them, and she was perhaps aware that the feeling was mutual; above all, she was angry with Henry for appointing them,
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and she must surely have guessed why they were there. Cromwell was no doubt hoping that, with a little baiting and pressure, she would give rein to her notoriously indiscreet tongue and incriminate herself.

As was customary with prisoners of rank, Anne was to take her meals with her custodian, Sir William Kingston. That first evening in the Tower—Kingston wrote on May 3 that “all these sayings was yesternight”—Anne, who was evidently aware of her peril, and of the need to
proclaim her innocence, desired Kingston, perhaps while they were at table, “to move the King’s Highness that she might have the sacrament in the closet by her chamber, that she might pray for mercy.” Certainly arrangements were immediately made for her to take Holy Communion that evening, because on May 7 she would recall, “I knew of Mark’s coming to the Tower that night I received the sacrament; it was ten of the clock ere he were well lodged, and I knew of Norris going to the Tower.” Evidently this was the first she had heard of these arrests. She did not as yet know that her brother had been taken.

She was anxious to make it clear to the constable that there was no reason why she should not receive the sacrament. “My God, bear witness there is no truth in these charges,” she declared to him, “for I am as clear from the company of man as from sin, [and] as I am clear from you; and am the King’s true wedded wife! Master Kingston, do you know wherefore I am here?”

“Nay,” Kingston replied, doubtless as he had been told to do. Cromwell was no doubt working on the premise that the less Anne knew, the more she might reveal.

“When saw you the King?” Anne persisted.

“I saw him not since I saw him in the tiltyard [on May Day],” he told her.

“Master Kingston, I pray you tell me where my lord my father is,” Anne demanded to know.

“I saw him afore dinner in the court,” Kingston replied.

Working herself up into what Cavendish called “the storms of deep desperation,”
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she cried, “Oh, where is my sweet brother?”—which, in the circumstances, probably sounded pretty damning.

“I said I left him at York Place,” Kingston reported, “and so I did.” Anne did not at this stage know of the shameful charge that was soon to be made against her and her brother, and she was perhaps hoping that Rochford would speak to the King on her behalf and stoutly defend her. She must also have imagined his distress when he heard of her arrest—and, of course, there is always the remote possibility that she had indeed committed incest with him, and knew there was much to fear. Her next words, coming immediately after her question about her brother, suggest that the awful truth might have been dawning on her.

“I hear say that I should be accused with three men,” Anne said, “and I
can say no more but nay, without I should open my body.” And so saying, “she opened her gown,” spreading her skirts in a dramatic and symbolic gesture, saying, “Oh, Norris, hast thou accused me? Thou art in the Tower with me, and thou and I shall die together.” Her words reveal her awareness of the fate that might well await her, and her reference to dying together supports the theory that she was close to Sir Henry, but not necessarily in an intimate way, although her enemies would see it in that light.

Then her thoughts turned to the other named man accused with her. “And Mark, thou art here too,” she said, becoming agitated again. “Oh, my mother, thou wilt die for sorrow,” she wept, “with much compassion,” as it struck her how badly the news of her arrest, with all its dread and shocking implications, would affect that lady, for just two weeks earlier Elizabeth Howard, Countess of Wiltshire, had been described by one of Lady Lisle’s correspondents as being “sore diseased with the cough, which grieves her sore”
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—and indeed, she was to die just two years later. Anne would have been aware of how ill she was.

Maybe the thought of her mother was too much to bear, for she quickly changed the subject and “much lamented my lady of Worcester, because her child did not stir in her body.” The Countess of Worcester, of course, had been the first person to lay evidence against Anne.

“What should be the cause?” Lady Kingston asked.

“It was for the sorrow she took for me,” Anne told her, referring perhaps to her miscarriage, or to the fear and misery she had suffered over the intervening weeks, which she had perhaps confided to the countess. It might also have been remorse over being pressured into betraying her mistress; and as a consequence of that, there would be even more cause for Elizabeth Browne to feel sorrow and guilt, because her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Somerset, was married to William Brereton,
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who had apparently been named by Smeaton as one of the Queen’s lovers.

Then the Queen turned to the constable. “Master Kingston, shall I die without justice?” she asked.

“The poorest subject of the King hath justice,” he replied, provoking bitter laughter in the Queen, who knew very well that persons accused of high treason were rarely acquitted, especially if it were known that the King wanted them condemned. She must have been aware that her enemies were out for her blood—and she knew that her husband was the most suggestible of men. She would have known also that her protestations
of innocence would avail her little, for the law did not allow her access to any lawyer or adviser, or any legal representative who could speak for her in court.
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Henry was by now resolved to be rid of Anne, in every respect. On the day of her arrest, he ordered Archbishop Cranmer to find grounds for annulling their marriage and declaring their daughter a bastard. There must be no impediment to any children he might have by Jane Seymour taking precedence in the order of succession to the throne.